G2 acts as a marketplace for buyers and sellers of business software. G2 facilitates this marketplace in two ways. First, G2 helps buyers of business software make smarter buying decisions when determining what software solutions are right for them. Second, they help companies who build and sell software understand exactly when a potential customer is conducting product research, and potentially in the market to purchase their software. G2 earns revenue by selling this buyer intent data, which is particularly invaluable to companies in competitive spaces.
G2 and their customers know the value of buyer intent data to software companies’ sales and marketing teams, but to grow their business they needed a way to increase awareness of this data amongst a group of their core target accounts. G2 identified these accounts by leveraging their CRM data, including variables such as industry, company size, and lead scoring. Once the demand generation team at G2 has specified these target accounts, they started to explore ways to run targeted promotion of their buyer intent data to these accounts.
To increase awareness for their solution, G2 recorded a proof-of-concept webinar with one of their customers to show the success they had seen by leveraging buyer intent data. For this campaign, they chose to target demand generation marketers at companies with more than 200 employees. With compelling content in hand and a target audience in mind, they now needed a way to drive traffic to the webinar at scale.
For this, they turned to the powerful combo of LinkedIn + HubSpot. “LinkedIn is one of our main paid acquisition channels,” says Adam Goyette, VP of Demand Generation at G2. “If you take the time to identify the audience you’re targeting and craft a message that will resonate with them, LinkedIn is one of the most powerful acquisition tools available.” Within HubSpot’s ads tool, G2 created LinkedIn targeting audiences based on dynamically updating lists in HubSpot so they could properly target their prospect accounts with this content offer. This was crucial to their overall success. “Targeting our ads using HubSpot’s contact list audiences allowed us to decrease acquisition costs for this webinar campaign while also increasing the quality of the leads who registered. There’s incredible value in having one list in HubSpot that you use across a marketing campaign -- whether it’s in an email send, or in an ad campaign. And having that list dynamically update within both HubSpot and LinkedIn is extremely important to us,” says Adam. To create these contact lists, They used their defined target audience and their CRM data to identify marketing and sales leaders who had previously shown interest in leveraging buyer intent data at their companies. With these audiences synced back to LinkedIn, they created a targeted ad campaign to promote the webinar.
Once someone arrived on their landing page, G2 felt confident in their ability to convert these target accounts. Through several rounds of A/B tests from previous campaigns in HubSpot, G2 had already refined how they positioned buyer intent data on their landing pages. Adam Goyette at G2 credits HubSpot’s optimization tools for their strong campaign conversion rates: “A/B testing in HubSpot gave us the tools we needed to refine our messaging, while simultaneously increasing our landing page conversion rate to an incredible 45%.” As leads converted on their landing page to view the webinar, Adam and his team regularly checked the status of their campaigns using the reports in HubSpot’s ads tool to ensure their campaign continued to drive the expected results and an appropriate ROI.
After converting on the landing page to watch the webinar, these leads entered automated set nurturing actions built by G2 using HubSpot’s marketing automation platform. Depending on the lead, they either entered an automated workflow where they could be nurtured further, or they entered an automated sales sequence that drove meetings between these leads and their sales team.
Through this campaign, G2’s demand generation team increased landing page conversion rate to 45%, generating 138 highly qualified leads that they could nurture and pass off to their sales team. Best of all, because they leveraged both HubSpot and LinkedIn together, G2 was able to maintain their overall lead quality, while decreasing their cost per lead by 25%.
“We loved the ability to easily create campaign assets, coordinate execution across channels, and measure impact during and after the campaign. HubSpot is the brain to our marketing operations at G2.”